Lessons from a Paperboy: Create the Right Process For Your Work!!!

We all use processes - specific sequenced steps - to accomplish our work. However, very often our processes are painful, inefficient, and ineffective. Perhaps the example below will illuminate.

My First Work Process
I first used a work process when I was a newspaper boy in the 8th grade. The process looked something like this:

1. Wake Up Late - Get up later than you need to, freak out, and move blearily into action.  
2. Assemble and Load - On the kitchen table, assemble the separate parts of the newspaper, bind them together with a rubber band, and place them in the bag.
3. Deliver - Using GIANT brand mountain bike, deliver papers to the appropriate houses.
4. Deal With Dogs - Curse at the various dogs on the route, attempting to kick or otherwise injure the small ankle-biters. Bike like hell to avoid attacks from the large ones.
5. Arrive Late to School - Walk in late to Ms. James' 8th grade typing class and receive a lecture about the importance of school and the relative unimportance of having a job as an 8th-grader.
6. Receive Additional Lectures - Later in the day, receive a phone call from Stewart Reese of the Newspaper Agency Corporation to chat with you about the need to deliver the papers in a more timely manner. 

Here is a newspaper delivery boy. This isn't me, though. I didn't live in Toronto in the 1940s. I did my delivering in Kearns, UT in the 1990s. Image source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newspaper_delivery#/media/File:Toronto_Star_paperboy_Whitby.jpg

As I look back at my experience delivering newspapers I have realized that (a) there were definitely things I needed to improve my process, and (b) I continued doing many of the wrong things for years.

Creating the Right Process
As professionals, we all use processes to perform our work, and these processes should be designed to minimize worker difficulty, create efficiency, and increase quality. However, just like my 8th grade self, many people and organizations continue to use processes that are painful, inefficient, and do not deliver quality results. And just like my 8th grade self, we continue to use these processes!

To be effective, you must select and create processes that minimize worker difficulty, create efficiency, and increase quality. What processes do you use in your work? Are they relatively painless? Are the efficient, or do they take more time than they should? Are they effective in meeting the goals of the organization? Analyze and document the processes you use and if necessary restructure and improve them. I would certainly have enjoyed my experience as a paperboy much more had I worked to improve my process. This is not to say that the dogs would have been interested in changing their own processes for attacking the paperboy...

How I Created Two Short Video Tutorials

I recently built two brief tutorials for a course I have been teaching in the IDPT Master's degree at Franklin University. I am teaching Foundations of Instructional Design, and in this course students are required to write an instructional goal, perform an instructional analysis, and perform a subordinate skills and entry skills analysis. I thought it would be interesting to document the process I went through to develop these tutorials (part 1 and part 2), and I will describe my ideas below.

The Background
When I taught this course in the past, I realized that the students needed additional guidance and examples of how to perform these activities. There were several examples from the course textbook and in the course website; however, all of these examples showed a completed example of the analysis, which (in my opinion) gives a false impression these analyses can be completed it in one draft. I wanted to give a real-world example of what it was like to work through these analyses in real time, showing that it takes some iteration and rework before getting everything in order.

Storyboarding and Visuals in Instructional Design
I realized as I worked on this project that I used visuals and rough storyboards throughout the process. In this blog post, you will see that I went through many different storyboards as I finalized what I wanted the presentation to look like. I think I use storyboards as a way to slowly and surely narrow in on what I want to accomplish. I start with general ideas and iteratively refine them as I get closer and closer to what I believe will work well.  My ideas went from (1) a giant sticky note to (2) a piece of paper to (3) a white board to (4) a PPT file and finally to (5) a finished video presentation. I thought it would be interesting to show how things evolved and show the visuals.

How to Record It?
I wanted to simulate how I have taught this kind of analysis in the classroom setting because I wanted it to feel more conversational in nature. My initial idea was to just get a camera and record me doing the presentation on a white board. I presented this idea to with my colleague/friend/elearning guru Julie Wuebker, who recommended using a SMART Podium so that I could draw it out on the screen capture it with a desktop capturing tool. This would, she reasoned, create a cleaner presentation and would allow me to stick to my goal to keep the presentation conversational. She drew out her ideas of how this would work on a giant sticky note as she explained her ideas in my office:

Julie's artifact - she used this to describe how I could use SMART Podium to record the videos.

Iterative Storyboarding

I thought about this off and on for a couple of weeks, and about a week before recording I brainstormed what I thought should be included in the presentation onto a blank sheet of paper. I tried to visualize the main pieces that I thought would provide an organizing structure and also provide examples of how to perform each of the tasks. I thought it through and mapped out the components I thought would be helpful. This was my initial storyboard:

My initial storyboard brainstorm. I tried to document everything I thought would be important to include in the short tutorial videos.

Whiteboard Storyboarding
The day before I recorded the videos, I wrote out some of the examples I thought I would use in the videos. I kept these pretty rough because I wanted to make sure the students could see the first attempt would not be perfect.

I wrote examples that I might use in the presentation on the whiteboard. This helped me to think roughly about what I would do.

After this brainstorming, I created a PPT presentation. I used this presentation (a) to present some of the concepts that I was teaching to the learners, and (b) to have a nice backdrop for the examples I would be sharing in the presentation.

My PPT file, which I used to present concepts and also used as a backdrop for the examples I was sharing.

Recording the Presentation
I used a SMART Podium. so that I could draw on the screen as I shared examples of how to do the instructional analysis. I wore a headset and recorded the raw video and audio using Microsoft Lync, which has a built in desktop capturing tool that is surprisingly easy to use (once you figure out where to go to start recording). I didn't write out a script for these tutorials because I wanted to maintain a conversational tone and show how the analysis might be done in a natural way.

I used a SMART Podium so that I could draw out my instructional analyses manually. I wore a headset and recorded video and audio using Lync.

Editing the Presentation
The recording produced an MP4 file which I uploaded from the computer with the SMART Podium to OneDrive for Business and returned to my office where I edited the videos using Camtasia Studio 8. I added in the visual call-outs with Camtasia. It took me about an hour to an hour and a half each to edit the videos into their final state.

My office where I edited the videos using Camtasia Studio 8. It took about 3 hours total to edit the two videos.

The Final Presentation
I published the videos from Camtasia as MP4s on my desktop and then uploaded them to my YouTube channel and also shared them with my class in the course website in our university's Learning Management System BlueQuill. Here are the final videos:

I am pretty happy with the quality of the videos, keeping in mind that one of my goals was to convey the iterative nature of an instructional analysis. I am hopeful it will give the students a little more context and some more ideas for the work they are doing in the course.

I hope this has been a useful view into my process for creating these videos. It is a rather rough approach, but I hope it gives you some ideas.

Improving Your Instructional Design Process

In this post, I will share my ideas on maximizing the effectiveness and efficiency of an instructional design process. A design process is integral to effective instructional design. It can increase quality and efficiency and decrease waste and errors. However, very often these processes are very general in nature, and the individual is left alone to determine how to implement it effectively. This can result in varying degrees of quality and can cause designers to waste energy recreating work that might be reduced through an effective, supported process.

Methods for Improving Your Instructional Design Process
Based on my experience, processes can be used to empower instructional designers and give them tools and support that will help them be more efficient and produce work that is of high quality. Below are some excellent strategies for improving an instructional design process:

1. Document the process. Do a job analysis and gain some clarity on what the process and what the work entails. Be clear about what is going on and what is expected. 
2. Clarify the goals and outputs for each phase. Make sure that there is clarity on exactly what the designer should produce for each phase of the design process.
3. Provide rubrics and checklists. How can a designer know the work is done it properly? Create easy to use checklists and so the designer can easily pass his or her work on to the next phase.
4. Constantly refine the process. Gather data, discover gaps, and work toward the ideal. Encourage and facilitate sharing and enable the designers to continuously improve. Designers are good at designing, so enable them to design how they design!
5. Provide tools for design. Create and provide templates, examples, technologies, and other tools for making the work more efficient, effective, and enabling.
6. Create a performance support page. (I describe this concept in detail near the end of this post). The support page should include the documentation, goals, outputs, rubrics, and tools for the design of the course.

Keep in mind that this advice is not given so that a manager or director can more easily control the instructional design process. The goal should be to remove barriers and enable the designer to be successful. Instructional design is a creative process, and the manager's goal should be to remove barriers, to eliminate wasted effort, and create a process that enables designer creativity and energy.

Criteria of a Quality Instructional Design Process
The general criteria of a good instructional design process include:

1. Efficient - Your process should be efficient and waste as little time on unnecessary tasks as possible. You must identify what level of efficiency is possible and work toward that ideal through improved efficiency.
2. Effective - Your process should create quality instructional products that reach the goals of the instruction. You must define what quality is and create a process that will support designers to achieve that level of quality.
3. Enabling - Your process should enable designers and other stakeholders to design outstanding materials. There are always inherent restrictions in instructional design, but your process should enable and empower designers as much as possible.

An Instructional Design Performance Support Website
One effective method is to create a Performance Support Website that houses the goals, outputs, templates, rubrics, and other resources used in the ID process. The idea is that designers could easily use this site to support their work. The site should be something that is created collaboratively by the design team and that is constantly updating and improving. The image below is my very rough conceptualization of what that site might look like.

Layout of a generic Instructional Design Performance Support Website.

Evaluating And Improving Your Own Instructional Design Process
The following questions may help you as you scrutinize and work to improve your own instructional design process:

• What is our instructional design process? Is it documented? If not, why?
• How do we know our process is working effectively? 
• How long does it take to build a course?
• Where are we wasting our time or repeating work in an unnecessary fashion? 
• How can we eliminate the time wasters and decrease overall time for building a course?
• How do we measure the quality of our work? What is a better way to do it?
• How do we evaluate and improve our process?
• Does the process we use restrict or enable our instructional designers to create quality instruction?
• How can we empower our instructional designers in their work?
• What tools will make our work more efficient and effective?
• What tools will enable our instructional designers to work with greater power?
• What tasks can we eliminate, automate, or delegate?

There are my current thoughts on improving instructional design processes. I will continue to think about this as I work with and around the excellent designers here at Franklin. Do you have any insights on how to improve the process of designing instruction?